Microsoft has sent an e-mail to a select number of its previous beta testers regarding the upcoming release of IE8 beta 1. "We are nearing the launch of Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and we will be making it available for the general public to download and test. IE8 Beta 1 is focused on the developer community, with the goal of gaining valuable feedback to improve Internet Explorer 8 during the development process."

If IE8 is as standard compliant as they say, then there should be little need to actually test it in the browser, any method that validates that your code is standards compliant would do.

Both FF3 and webkit are resonably standards compliant so if your code looks good in them, it should look good in IE8 too. E.g FF3 passes the acid2 test, and does quite well on acid3 (59/100) that is targeted at ecma script standard compliance. Have anybody teste IE8 with acid3? Would be fun to know how well it does on acid3 (http://acid3.acidtests.org/).

The real problem is people that still runs IE6. They are the ones that will prevent web developers from building standard compliant websites that looks good in every browser.